


The Passion

by snagov



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Desire, First Time, Love Confessions, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Canon Fix-It, Protectiveness, Sexual Tension, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, good old fashioned fucking on a bearskin rug before a fire, hunger, james and francis' seaside retirement cottage, kinda canon-typical hunger and cannibalism themes but it doesn't actually happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:22:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27262687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snagov/pseuds/snagov
Summary: It takes three months for James to recover. Now, Francis is very careful with him and James might scream.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 29
Kudos: 130





	The Passion

"Fear of eating, fear of the edible, fear on the part of the one of them who feels loved,  
desired, who wants to be loved, desired, who desires to be desired, who knows there  
is no greater proof of love than the other’s appetite, who is dying to be eaten up, who says  
or doesn’t say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow.  
And yet manage it so as to keep me alive. But I often turn about or compromise,  
because I know that you won’t eat me up, in the end, and I urge you: bite me.  
Sign my death with your teeth”  
― Hélène Cixous, _Stigmata_

* * *

It takes three months for James to recover. 

Scurvy is a strange beast; as quickly as the body comes apart, undoing the threads of skin and sinew, so it might sew itself back up again. James had hated the cups of lime juice once, but when the men of Rae’s search party had brought it to his tent and Francis had pressed it to his lips, James had drank from it as if it were nectar. The bullet wound in his side had been the last to heal. He could mark his progress by shade and color. From the dark red of exposed muscle to the white froth of fat to then, finally, the tender pink of healing skin; James had commented on it once during a dressing change, remarking on how the body is not entirely different from the levels of the sea. It takes most men two weeks to make a full recovery and James is an impatient patient, leaving Francis to gently remind him that he is not most, that his body has seen more ravages over the past years than many men combined. 

Francis is very careful with him. He brushes James’ hair back with a calculated touch, knowing the exact depth so as to not cause hurt. He keeps the lantern turned low and closes the tent flaps tightly, knowing how the light pains scorbutic eyes. Even the sound of the camp, shouts and cheers, the cacophony of _living rescue_ , Francis quiets with a finger to his lips, reminding his men that there is still one of their number not yet out of the dark. It is a month at rescue camp and then, once James is deemed well enough to be moved, a month on the ship across the Atlantic, and then a month of convalescence here, in this small, unprepossessing cottage Francis has rented, thinking that James would heal best in the gentler air of Bath. A simple place, no more than two bachelor gentlemen might need: three bedrooms (one for each and for a guest too, should they have any), a pleasantly sunny drawing room, and a rambling garden. A housekeeper comes in the mornings, preparing breakfast and doing the cleaning, but largely James and Francis are left to their own devices and here, away from the lives they’ve always and ever led, Francis has found he’s a solidly dependable cook and a not-entirely-murderous gardener; the flowers, to both he and James’ surprise, have lived. As James strengthens, he often walks or reads in the garden, telling tales to the trellises and tulips. Francis brings him tea, heavy black tea smelling of bergamot and orange, never too hot. Always and ever being careful. 

James might scream. 

A healed body is a whole body. In his room, alone and undressed, James might take a letter opener and drag it along the scars, pushing gently at the skin and feeling it there, unbroken and secure. The metal might push and threaten but the skin bounces back almost as if to say _I can take it._ He can, god, he can. He can be touched without kid gloves, can be brushed against like a human being again, not some fine crystal that might shatter. Once, James pushes against the bullet scar, pushing his fingers as hard against his chest as he can, feeling the firm jail cell of his ribcage beneath, unbroken bone and a still-steady heart. Push, yes, push until the skin bruises, just to see if it can. It can, yes, and it heals too. He pushes and pulls at the rest of himself with less brutal intent: a hand between his thighs, his hips against the mattress, fingers at a nipple, teeth in his lip. _Francis,_ he cries out, always silently. _Francis Francis Francis._ Remembering nights in a ship’s cabin, wondering how Francis might look if James were allowed to peel the wool from his body like the rind from an orange. Remembering days on shattered shale, his boots crunching against the brutal landscape, his one good eye trained on Francis Crozier. _Are you hungry,_ Francis would ask, bringing some miserable something from a rotten red tin or a piece of their dwindling, waxy chocolate. He had been starving, his bones poking out like graves in the snow, but fever had killed his appetite, so the answer had always been no. 

_Are you hungry_ has become the refrain; Francis would ask every night and the fierce pleasure at James’ _yes_ was impossible to miss. In their home, Francis has turned to recipe books and learning new techniques, just to make sure that James’ hunger was always indulged, always sated. _A man can’t live on salt pork forever,_ Francis had said, eyes nearly twinkling, as he put his first home-cooked meal before James. (It had been better than James had feared; he suspects their housekeeper might have been giving Francis lessons while James slept.) Each meal carefully balanced. Meat, bread, vegetable. Francis would not see any danger come to James from touch, from sight, from sound, nor now from food. 

So then, it was a surprise to hear his own voice tonight in response to Francis’ daily inquiry; there in his own baritone, a strong _no._

The autumn has largely faded into the pale dawn of winter. Dark comes early now and evening crowds at the windows like a nosy neighbor. They sit in opposite chairs at the fire, both men with books open in their laps and empty teacups on the table. James rubs a restless finger along the edge of his book, looking up into Francis’ wide, worried eyes. 

“James, are you alright- “ 

“No,” he says, pauses and inhales, licking his lip and starting again. His heart performs a dance; his blood runs in a fiery river. He is hungry, this is a lie. He is starving, in fact. “No, I mean, yes, but -“ 

“But?” Francis raises a pale brow, inclining his head. His cheeks are ruddy in the heat of the fire, red as a rust stain. Shadows catch in the pockmarked skin, pooling darkness. James wants to lick it off him, the redness and the darkness too. What would he taste like? James has kissed men before but nothing about Francis makes sense, nothing about Francis is expected. How could Francis Crozier, who pulled James from the mouth of the Arctic, taste anything like simple skin and salt? 

Would he allow it? If James kissed him? Touched him? Climbed atop him and settled his body between those spread thighs and sturdy hips or pushed Francis up against the wainscoting, shoving his hands within Francis’ trousers and showing him just what elegant fingers might do? 

He is tired of being held like a thing about to break. His bones are not made of glass. 

He sets the book to the side and stands, walking closer to Francis’ chair. Terror at the helm and bad decisions in his sails, but there’s something in the way Francis watches him with bright pale eyes, as blue as hypoxia, as blue as the center of a flame swallowing a tent whole, as blue as the blood he does not have -

James catches himself breathing hard, the backs of his thighs warmed by the fire through his dark wool trousers, standing before a man breathing just as fast. He might ruin everything, kissing Francis. But then, Francis would be gentle in his destruction. He’d take James apart as cleanly as a surgeon, keeping the wounds neat and bandages at the ready. He would be gentle and James would heal. He has before. He had been careful as he carried James across the ice, cautious not to jostle James’ wound. He had held James in his lap while he had pressed cloth soaked in icemelt to the injury, like Mary had held her son pulled down from the Cross.

He closes his eyes. One more second, just one before the firing squad.

“I want something else.”

Francis inhales. Once, twice. Again. “Do you?” His voice is faint. James hesitates. Should he open with the words? Speak the words, Mr. Fitzjames: _I need you. I crave you._ Should he let touch speak for him, leaning down and pressing his mouth to Francis’ own? Should he - 

“Oh for God’s sake -“ Francis spurts out, red as the Devil, reaching up to grip James at the waist and reel him in between his thighs. In an instant, James tumbles into the chair and Francis tilts his own face upward, his mouth finding James’ own. Salt. He tastes of salt. His mouth is hot and wet and open for him, kissing James like a starved man at a feast. 

“Oh my God,” James whispers, half the words finding themselves spilling out into Francis’ kiss, the rest pressed into Francis’ cheek and hair by the flurry of James’ lips across his face. “I want, God, I want - “

“You have me,” Francis murmurs, fierce and desperate. James’ cracked heart suddenly aches, a disused thing quickly overfilled. Tender things are always sore at the start. James kisses him again and keens at the feel of Francis’ wide hands finding their way to his dark hair. “These curls, do you have any blasted idea how they’ve driven me mad?”

He pulls on a curl and James hisses, bucking in his lap, eyes slammed shut. When he looks again, Francis is breathing hard, looking poleaxed. “Francis. Francis, _please_.”

“I wondered what you’d be like. For years. For _years_ , James - “

James drops his hand to the front of Francis’ trousers, where he had felt the promise of something hard and hot press against his belly when he shifted. Francis swears under his breath. James leans in, his breath hot and damp on Francis’ ear. “Then come and find out.”

“You’ll be the death of me.”

James smirks. He’d always been quick at knotwork and is just as deft with the buttons here, laying Francis’ trousers open and pulling his cock from within. It’s hot. Alive. Fat and hungry in his hand. James can feel his own swollen self twitching beneath his clothes. Even this, trying to find some furtive rutting relief, is too much; he imagines dropping to his knees and licking his lips, the saliva pooling in his mouth, holding his mouth wide open until his jaw aches. His dick is already twitching in his trousers, the plump head swollen and leaking into his linen and wool. 

He is breathless. “Right here?” Right here, in the middle of the sitting room? Francis rubs a strong palm over James’ stiff prick; his shirt is growing soaked with his own slick, like a boy again. He’ll come right off in his own clothes, he will. He’ll never be able to look at this room, the tooled leather spines of books lining the walls and the moss green wallpaper, without turning seven shades of bright red. 

“Aye,” Francis gasps. “Right here.” He frees James’ cock and there, finally, there’s his hot palm. James draws an uneven breath. He might be mortified by himself, his weeping cock quickly leaking all over Francis’ now wet and slippery fingers, except for how Francis stares with hooded, hot eyes and grows impossibly harder in James’ fist. “Right here where we might have guests and no matter how fine you are, James, no matter how elegant, I’ll know I’ve had you right in this bloody chair.” 

_Christ._ “What if we sell this chair?” His voice low, teasing. Eyes half-lidded. 

“Then I’ll just have to fuck you on every chair we have.”

“And if we have no chairs?”

“I’ll fuck you open on the floor, right on that blasted rug. Against the wall. I’ll find a way to take you on the ceiling if I must.” 

“Francis!” He cries out at a deliberate swipe of the head of his cock; Francis keeps his thumb just on the underside, moving in slow, careful circles. It’s electric. With a shift and a hand to balance James on his thighs, Francis takes them both in his steady hand, fucking them both in James’ own slick. James nearly sobs when his cock comes into contact with Francis’. His hips twitch in minute, uncontrolled bursts, trying to fuck into the hand that keeps him. “I can’t - I won’t last - “ 

“Come for me,” Francis growls. 

“God, not yet, I want you to break me open.” 

“I won’t hurt you.”

“You can’t. You _won’t_. I’m healed, Francis. I’m healthy. God, it hurts.” 

Francis’ hand stills immediately. “What hurts?”

James fruitlessly tries to rock his prick against Francis’ pelvis. “I am empty and it aches, please, Francis, for the love of all that is holy, put your _goddamn_ cock in me and fill me up.” 

A harsh, violent growl comes from Francis. In an instant, James finds himself hoisted from the chair by capable arms and laid upon the bearskin rug. 

“Don’t - “ Francis starts, then inhales slowly, as if trying to control something within him. “Don’t go anywhere.” And he disappears from the room. In a second, James can hear the cabinets slamming in their kitchen, a low Irish brogue muttering _where is it, where the hell did I put that blasted thing._ James sits up and sets his hands to task, unbuttoning his waistcoat and trousers, slipping linen and wool from his now-bare skin. He’s too thin still (he will always be too thin); one might count his ribs and the chiaroscuro shadowplay of the fire does nothing kind for the hollows of his cheeks. His skin is imperfect; his scars, too many. He doesn’t love the brutal pucker of the bullet wound on his side, rippled like a city in earthquake. He doesn’t love the silvered stretchmarks on his underarms, his inner thighs, his lower belly (he had grown too fast, all in one summer, and it had left the scars behind to prove it). He doesn’t love how at thirty-five, his hair has begun to silver. Thirty grey hairs, thirty pieces of silver at the temples, yes, but also on the brushstrokes of hair on his chest and the thatch between his thighs. His skin is not so firm, not as it had been a decade ago. For a moment, James wishes he might have found Francis then, when he had been truly beautiful. 

But the moment passes and when Francis walks through the door again with the found oil in his hands, he finds James on the bearskin rug before a ripe fire, on his knees with legs spread, proud and naked as Adam. 

“Jesus Christ,” Francis says, stopped cold. His eyes are wide, mouth wide. He might inhale James by sight and swallow alone. James flushes. He had been tempted to cover himself but is glad he had not, especially as Francis’ starved-wolf stare lingers on his long, curved cockstand, shining and seeping. “God, you’re beautiful.” 

“Come here.”

Francis nods, taking a shaky breath to fortify himself. He walks forward and sets the bottle down, then drops to James on the rug, kissing him. Francis kisses the way wants to fuck, desperate and possessive, tongue firm and thick in James’ mouth. It’s unexpected, the way Francis kisses him like a hungry wretch, as if he were uncertain there might be food leftover. As if he might not have a second chance, another taste to fill his belly, so he will eat his fill now. James wants to comfort him; James wants to be consumed. His dick twitches, needing to be devoured. His body clenches on emptiness, needing to be filled up. Francis kicks his trousers from himself and in a moment, the waistcoat joins the pile, leaving only his shirtsleeves left. 

“Let me see you.”

“You won’t like what you see.”

“Please.”

A short, hesitant nod and the shirt goes too. Francis joins him bare and James leans in, pressing hard kisses to his chest, his sides, his belly, his flanks. He threads his fingers through the patch of hair on Francis’ chest and runs his tongue along the slope of Francis’ soft, firm shoulders, leaving a trail of shining spit in his wake. God, how Francis looks. There’s something brutal and masculine in him. In the age and shape of him; James would not be as hard for a man younger, thinner, sleeker. James would not pulse and ache at the thought of another man pulling his body open, working his cock into James like a hot spit. He wants to roast on Francis. He wants Francis to come inside of him a thousand times over, until there is no part of James untouched. He wants Francis to reach for him as if James is his right, his and his alone. (He wants Francis to always be Francis, trembling and shattered at James’ kiss.) 

How does it start? James pressing forward, pushing his leg between Francis’ thighs. His heartbeat speeds up, calling for war. Francis pushes James to the rug and James pulls him in after _. I want you,_ he wants to scream it. It is a chickenbone in his throat, choking him. Francis, this unexpected island in the sea. That's the trouble with navigation. You cannot plan for a storm, sometimes you are blown off-course. Not all waters are charted. When he tells his story someday, most of it will be skipped over. We don't tell the dull everyday. You don't need to know about laundry detergent and grocery lists, brands of soap. Yes, most he will jettison, the _flotsam und jetsam_ of his existence. This, however, this moment will be the pinnacle. The bright spot.

Francis is gentle. Francis is always gentle. Above him, within him. Slow to move. Slow in his strokes. In slowness, it dawns on James that Francis is deliberately taking his time, stretching out the night’s minutes and hours so that he might linger here as long as possible. 

_Faster. Harder._

His fingers scramble at Francis’ shoulders, at his biceps like a drunk fool reaching for a dropped knife. Sweat dripping from Francis’ face, his eyes tightly closed, whispering obscenities and blasphemies. " _Oh my fucking god, James, you fucking perfect, ridiculous, stupid bastard. How the fuck, oh god, yes, just like that, love. Do it again. Do you like that? Are you okay? Can I stay in you forever? I'm going to keep you. Do you know that? Fuck, fucking god. Oh fuck._ "

James has wondered, ached with curiosity. He consumes Francis. Is there any other way to describe it? He swallows Francis’ thick fingers in his mouth because he is aching and ravenous, hungry and starved. He keens into the touch, his voice lost and unknown. When Francis cries out to the sky ( _James!_ ), he wonders if this is a different world from before, a new Francis, a new James, wiped clean of their mistakes like a chalk slate. 

He thinks too much; Francis doesn't seem to mind. That quick hand on the draw, wrapping around him, shutting him up for _once, thank god, yes, stop me from thinking._ It is quick and hard and he has a tongue in his mouth and sometimes they nick teeth and there will be blood. When he comes, driving his hips hard against Francis’ belly, feeling the scrape of soft hair and firm skin and his own passion spilling out hot and sticky between them. (In this moment, the seconds before his heart restarts, as he comes down from the sky, the world retracts to almost nothing. A rug and a fire, a chair and a pair of socks kicked off to a corner. _Francis._ Always Francis.)

In the aftermath, with sweat cooling on his skin, James relearns how to breathe. Spread out on the rug like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. It is an unnatural position for him, face up and spread out. Usually, he curls up on his side, prefers face down into the pillow. Animals get it, they understand. Keep your belly hidden, the soft bits. Those are your weak spots, keep those hidden away. Sometimes, if you're lucky, you can earn their trust, they sleep on their backs. 

He does not move. Francis leans over him, running his rough fingers up and down his forearms. He pauses over the bullet scar, tracing the fault line where it interrupts his skin. He says nothing, only bends his head and, where a bullet had once gone, Francis’ kiss follows.

* * *

He dreams of hunger. Of Napoleon at the table, drooling.

Napoleon, it was said, was an indifferent eater. His hungers were for nothing so base as food. Any ordinary man might eat beef and butter but Napoleon never wished to be an ordinary man. He drank his Chambertin watered down and picked at the edges of his bread, but mostly he craved only one thing; a whole chicken plucked and roasted, the skin crispy and the juices running clean from the breast when his incisors sunk into it. At the Tuileries Palace, _les poulets_ were constantly spinning on rotisseries, waiting for the sound of the Emperor’s bell, which came at all hours of the day and night. He didn’t bother with a fork and left the knife where he found it, instead picking the bird up and pulling it apart with his fingers alone. The chickens traveled with him wherever he went, from pressing along the western front as la grande armée marched upward toward Moscow to the three he had wrapped in brown paper whilst he surveyed the Suez isthmus. 

Later, he would confide in his server at Elba that he had only wanted three things in his life: chickens, Josephine, and the world.

All of it, simply hunger.

There are too many stories of starving creatures. His uncle had told him that once, some fifty-odd years ago, there was a Frenchman who never stopped being hungry. It didn’t matter what he ate, it didn’t matter how much he shoved down his gullet, hunger always knocked at his door. Tarrare would starve with half a cow in his belly and stomach distended. His parents had sent him away at age fifteen, unable to put enough on his plate, and he had joined the revolutionary army after, enticed by their messes. The soldiers had marveled at his grotesque feats. Once, he inhaled an entire feast intended for fifteen people. Another time, he swallowed barrels of live eels without chewing. 

“Aren’t you full?” he was asked.

“Non, jamais,” he replied, wiping his mouth with a napkin. _No, never._

Hunger always followed him, a greasy shadow of want hovering just behind. He was a medical curiosity for some time, both for his capacity of hunger and the strange fact of his being dangerously underweight. But then, when no explanation nor cure followed, the public grew tired of him. When the hospital diet proved insufficient at only quadruple rations, he peeled back the thin blankets and snuck from his bed to pull roadkill from the gutters and haunt the morgue for a midnight snack. The doctors found him at the bedsides of those patients being bled, drinking his fill. When a patient disappeared late one night, Tarrare was driven from town. In his last years, he haunted Versailles, penniless and weak. He died of consumption, age twenty-six, still desperate to consume.

James had been wide-eyed at that story. It had terrified him, what men might do for a morsel to fill their bellies and quell the ache. His aunt had told another, years later, while she had boiled blood on the stove with a few tablespoons of vinegar, mixing with buckwheat and pork to make sausage. The strange metallic smell has never left him. Her smell was blood, as it will be always and ever. She had told him stories of Erzsébet Báthory in her tower, the cold stones of Čachtice Castle surrounding her. The blood of the young villagers had left her permanently smelling of iron; it was said that you would know the countess long before you saw her, just by that awful smell.

James has seen hunger well enough himself. It was his first captain who had the taste for whole animals. James had watched as he ate, putting entire fish in his mouth and pursing his lips around them; he’d shift his wide jaw right and left, the jowls swinging with him like an udder. After a minute or so, he’d pull the fishbones right back out again, sucked clean. It had been an uneasy thing to watch and James had shuddered at the spit and oils shining on his wet chin. After a few months, a whole fish wouldn’t do, so the captain had asked for two, then three, then five. After the _Pyramus_ had dropped anchor off the Continent for a hot two weeks in August, the captain had heard tell of how the French considered the consumption of whole birds a delicacy. Ortolans, they say, were preferred for the satisfying crunch of their fine bones between a man’s molars. The captain would not rest until the ship’s cook had prepared an ortolan for him. James had peered in, fascinated, as the captain sat before his china plate with silver fork and silver knife in each hand, a plucked, roasted bird set before him. The bird had taken a long bath in Armagnac brandy after being plucked and trussed and the room swam with the scent. What James did not know then, age thirteen, was that the eating of a songbird is a private thing; he watched with wide eyes as the captain unfolded a white linen napkin and draped it over both his head and the dish like pulling the sheets over a marriage bed. 

When the napkin came down, the bird was gone and the captain sat back, belly full and picking his teeth with a bone. 

True story.

* * *

  
  


He wakes up in the middle of the night, ravenous. 

They had gone to bed together, sleeping side by side. Francis had made room for James in his bed, turning the covers down, leading him by the hand. James had been grateful to the dark when they’d put out the lamp; overwhelmed, he had pulled the dark over him like a blanket. Francis held his hand in sleep, his pulse steady beneath James’ grip, beating on like a current. 

It’s a strange heat that fuels him. James has never been like this before, in this strange hunger. For one wild, terrifying instant, he thinks of the horrors of Terror Camp: the bones in their pots, the unmentionable meat on their plates. _Consume me. Consume me, Francis, and I’ll never be hungry again._ This hunger, this mad mad mad hunger is like nothing he’s ever felt. There’s no center to it, no growling belly to be filled. If he might be subsumed by Francis, made whole with his flesh, then he could never want. 

He shakes himself, strands of sweat-soaked dark hair falling in his eyes. Francis stirs. 

“James?” 

“Shh,” he whispers. “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.” (He believes none of his own words.) 

“Come here.” Francis offers an arm, pulling James closer like a carp on a hook. James goes easily, willingly, till his back is flush with Francis’ chest and that rolling, living, breathing body is curled around him. There are sleep-softened kisses for his shoulders, for the nape of his neck, for his hair. Francis buries his mouth in the bend of James’ neck and kisses him, scraping his teeth over James’ heartbeat. ( _Bite me, yes, please, dig your teeth into the meat of me. Pick me first from the table. Take me, all of me.)_ James gasps. Francis stills behind him for a moment and then, offered uncertainly, like the answer to a riddle, presses his hips against James. 

“ _Please_ ,” James says. (Begs. _Please. Please, use my body. Feed yourself. Put your mouth on me, make me whole._ ) 

He learns Francis fucks the way he sails a ship: with deliberate, careful intent. With a constant awareness of his partner’s hisses and moans and bitten tongues, just as he might watch the sky or sea. James had once watched how Francis touched Terror with gentle fingers, trailing his heart across her oak bulkheads; he had never imagined that he might be touched in kind. He has never seen Francis love anything like that ship, nothing like Terror, queen of shipwrecks, sunk to the bottom of the sea. Not like that, not like that love - 

Love. The idea is surreal, electric. James has never touched nor been touched in love, he would not know it if it were served to him on a platter, yet - the idea lingers, throbbing under his skin. Francis pulls him tighter against his chest, palming James’ own cockstand, pushing his against James’ back. It should be a pale imitation, shouldn’t it? Rutting into the backside of another man, like a quick fumble between schoolboys. But Francis grinds into him steadily, one hand pulling on James in perfect tandem and the other wrapped around his chest, settled just over his heart. 

James shudders once and then comes, spilling white-hot over Francis’ hand. Francis follows him shortly after, tumbling into oblivion. 

For a long time, James simply breathes slowly in the dark. The dark is familiar now. He knows the shadows, knows them all. His skin is damp and pink and when James turns to look at Francis, he can see the murky shape of his face and shoulders rising out of the bed, one bright eye open yet and peering at him, like a lighthouse in a long night. Francis brushes the hair from James’ face, then lingers there, fingers running through his hair, thumb slowly rubbing across each curl, like a priest with his rosary. No one has ever looked at him like a prayer before. Like gold, yes. Like jewels, like coins, something to acquire and display. But this is something else. Devotion. 

_I think I’m in love with you._ This thought surfaces, sudden and unbidden. He’s in love. James Fitzjames is thirty-five years old with nightmares in his pockets and ache in his throat and he is in love for the first time in his life. This isn’t hunger. This has never been hunger at all. This is passion. 

He has always been terrified of what men might do to stop the ache. 

“Francis - “ ( _I think I’m in love with you._ )

“Yes?”

James breathes, picking at the threads of the sheets, chewing on the inside of his lip. The grey of Francis’ temple gleams in the faint moonlight. He can see how the vein throbs there, a constant betrayal of Francis’ own nervousness. Francis is uncertain. Somehow that smooths the rumples for him, knowing that Francis might be as terrified as he is, that he might not know how to navigate this either. 

( _I think I’m in love with you._ )

“James?” Francis prods, his voice soft. 

( _I think I’m in love with you._ )

James swallows. 

“James,” Francis says, staring at him with an odd, fierce look. He has gone very rigid against James, his body drawn tense and taut. “What is it?”

( _I think I’m in love with you._ ) “I don’t know what you want this to be. I know men often find release at sea with one another but I - “ He draws a breath, looking anywhere but at the man against him. “I must know if this means something more.” 

“James, I loved you when we were still picking lead from our teeth in the blasted ice.”

A breath. James looks up with dark, uncertain eyes. His voice is thin and shallow. “And now?”

“You must know,” Francis murmurs, drawing James in for a kiss. Fervent and chaste, pressed to his mouth. His forehead. The bridge of his nose, the delicate skin of his eyelids. His hands, his hair, his wrists, his chest. “You must, don’t you? I wanted you there, if we were to have breathed our last in that godforsaken place. I wanted you here, even if it was only to be near you. Hear you laugh and breathe. I want to hear that bloody story about the river again. Birdshit Island. I would listen to them all - _all_ of them - just to hear you still talking. James, _you must know_.” 

James kisses him at once, pulling Francis to his lips like lime juice, needed all along. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I drew a lot of influence from Jeanette Winterson's "The Passion" and Hélène Cixous' "Stigmata" in this.


End file.
